Face (book) news

I like reading the news, and I browse through it online with the kind of gusto you’d expect from an ex-journalism major. 

This takes less and less time each day. As the presidential election draws closer, an increasing proportion of the news is dedicated to either hating on the candidates (Barack Obama’s a member of al-Qaida), loving the candidates (leave Bristol Palin, her baby daddy and her love child alone) or providing irrelevant information about the candidates (do you really want Sarah Palin’s recipe for caribou hotdogs?).

I was about to hit a breaking point when someone decided to cater to the politically, socially and generally apathetic and shallow minds of my generation by providing a multitude of news stories on the geek chic phenomenon du jour (sorry Mr. Gore, it’s not global warming), Facebook. 

I’m a member of the first class of freshmen to join Facebook after it was opened up to general use beyond Harvard and the Ivy Leagues. From the fall of freshman year to my final fall semester as an IU senior, I’ve seen Facebook snowball into the 100-million member, obsessive-compulsive, generation-defining phenomenon that it is now.  
Now its new layout is getting media coverage, and the Wall Street Journal is trying to copy its “social networking” features to draw more users. 

Why, our very own IDS ran a story on Monday about “the New Facebook.” It’s good to see that after enduring approximately 732,689 invitations to join groups with eloquent titles such as “The New Facebook Sucks” and “I Hate the New Facebook,” someone finally decided to give voice to the enraged masses and their cyber plight. 

As of right now, the situation is in stable, yet critical condition. We have 1.6 million members in the group “1,000,000 against the New Facebook” and 3,000 members in the group “I kind of like the New Facebook!”

There’s no word yet on whether Mark Zuckerburg gives a crap. Keep on holding your breath, folks! 

In other shocking news, “Even College English Teachers Fall for Facebook.” If you didn’t know that, the opinion section on Yahoo News Online has graciously provided its readers a piece by that very title. 

The scary tidbit found in that one? Forty percent of people using Facebook are over the age of 35. That’s right. Your college English professor has Facebook, and the next logical, yet horrifying, step will be logging one morning to face the unspeakable “friend request” from your mom. I’m glad I read that piece, though, because if I hadn’t, I can only assume I would have read yet another commentary about lipstick on pigs or pitbulls or politicians or whatever. 

Well, we whined when they let high-schoolers join – nobody wants their little brother keeping tabs on them. We complained when they opened it up to public use – nobody wants to be “poked” by creepy pedophile-esque 47-year-old townies.  
We can bitch and moan all we want about the new layout. 

The world keeps spinning, and people keep Facebooking. The only marked difference is we have another noun-turned-verb in our vocabulary.